Thirty-Seven

Two hand-painted cards, one showing abstract interconnected blobs in orange, yellow, and green; and the other showing blue and green pools surrounded by inked brown stones.

What is it, when you wake up one day and you're in your late-mid-thirties and suddenly you're considering whether or not your doodles count as Zentangles and you've developed a taste for Folgers and you've decided that this is the year you're going to learn local tree species with the only viable path forward being through pursuing one of Druidry?

And your body acts increasingly strange and your sensory sensitivities while present throughout life are somehow more pronounced and that whereas you thought interfacing with humans would get better with practice and age has actually resulted in your armpits erupting into busted fire hydrants?

And the pain of aging loved ones is matched only by grief for loved ones who stopped aging a while ago and you're staring down the last 15 years of employment knowing that another 30 years of the same would be completely untenable and almost certainly lethal?

And a lifetime of small traumas and an adulthood of some larger traumas, not even counting the collective outrages of the past nine years of so, keep cropping up in mountingly erratic and crippling ways that makes you very nervous for what the future could look like?

And you find yourself struggling to even be a person when interacting with coworkers and customers and family members and most of all your neighbors, one of whom only this year learned to not mow and weedeat your yard and another who's upset that you were upset that he burned down a lovely and privacy-providing forsythia bush as well as almost your deck and a third who keeps a pack of dogs that bark incessantly whenever you step outside, instigated by one little rat-terrier-thing that has no qualms about chasing you up the street or harassing you from the sidewalk in front of your house while your partner extends a universe of magnanimous grace to the situation whilst you've gone rabid wishing for retribution and barking back at the rat dog that this is in fact your house and not its?

And your inner girl boss babe burnout has to be tamped down when you pick up a new and meditative coping hobby that you truly do not wish to monetize no matter how much your inner hustler schemes and also your state's tax reporting portal is an absolute nightmare and you're still procrastinating canceling the LLC you set up in a fit of pandemic boredom and post-abusive-relationship fuzzy edges even though that yarn shop dream resulted in all inventory and no sales at all and a beautiful website you abandoned months later?

But you try to maintain a near-daily practice of making splotchy watercolor pools on thick paper, letting them dry completely as you learned the hard way, and then you outline rocks and other primordial forms because you gave up on trying to replicate the real world in art form a long time ago?

And you see that Google's Facebook page (ew) has a cover photo of AI-imagined (ugh) coral that could never touch the works of your hands, which is one small relief but also feels like a cheap substitute stolen from the products of other and even better fiber artists' hooks?

Never mind the nonstop mass casualty events and the political Punch & Judy shows and endless commentary of internet strangers that have all got so bad that you've had to add a mindful timer to your phone's browser app to demotivate you from using it at all?

And meanwhile it seems like the only way to free yourself from harmful situations of any size is to elect the nuclear option, or at least be prepared to in the event your communication strategies pan out exactly as you fear?

And attempting to find time to upskill for god-knows-actually-why and also remembering that you should get your teeth fixed and your body examined in the event your false sense of security is pulled out from under you to find yourself jobless but also free to pursue the almost certainly hostile wonderland of self-employment?

And finding ways to make feeding yourself daily easier through meal prep and night-before planning but also finding even these easy tasks such a chore and also why aren't you the same weight you were as a malnourished and emotionally overwrought 22-year-old?

I don't know either, but I have a lot of feelings about it.